In a context of widespread hopelessness, a loss of direction, and a certain fin-de-siècle sensibility , young people are developing particular ways of engaging their subjectivity with the world around them. Their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors do not arise in a vacuum, but are inscribed within a specific historical and cultural moment, and they find their own languages ​​to express themselves.

The proliferation of narratives about the "end of the world" is both a result and a cause of this contemporary climate: it gathers existing anxieties, amplifies them, and offers ways of representing the unease that pervades our time. In this sense, mental health, understood as a space in which our sufferings, longings, and worries manifest themselves individually and collectively, in our bodies and subjectivities, can serve as a compass for understanding the era we inhabit.

Some contemporary ways of expressing and naming distress evoke those that gained prominence during the Romantic period. The presence of suicide and anxiety, as well as the growing tendency to interpret and name suffering through the mental sciences, allow us to revisit the past to understand the problems, languages, and symptoms of the present.